Profile: Daniel Dorling

Dr. Daniel Dorling, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield, UK, Adjunct Professor of geography at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand; and Visiting Professor, Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol. Danny’s research concentrates on social and spatial inequalities to life chances. He is currently working on the implications of rising housing market and wealth inequalities, the polarization of health and the prospects for new social policies based on evidence and advocacy.

Danny Dorling was born and raised in Oxford, England. He attended the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, studying geography, mathematics and statistics, and earning his Ph.D. in 1991. He continued at Newcastle as a Joseph Rowntree Foundation and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow before migrating to Bristol, Leeds, and then Sheffield in 2003. To try to counter his myopic world view, in 2006, Danny began working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world ( http://www.worldmapper.org ). His research attempts to show how far understanding the patterns to people’s lives can be enhanced using cartography and population statistics. In Britain he has recently worked on the housing market and health inequity issues under a changing national government.

Some of his publications relevant to health geography include: Inequalities in Life and Death (with Mary Shaw and Rich Mitchell, 2000); Health, Place and Society (also with Shaw and Mitchell, 2002); People and Places: A Census Atlas of the UK (with Bethan Thomas, 2004); Human Geography of the UK (2005); and Life in Britain: Using Millennial Census Data to Understand Poverty, Inequality and Place (with Ben Wheeler, Mary Shaw and Rich Mitchell).

Danny’s academic awards include a Philip Leverhulme Prize for outstanding scholarship (2003), an appointment as Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, and an Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand, 2005). In 2006, he was awarded a British Academy Research Leave Fellowship to study social evils in the UK and in 2007 with seven colleagues he published Poverty, Wealth and Place in Britain, 1968-2005. Among other projects, he is currently working with others on drawing new atlases of identity and mortality in Britain.